Researchers Find what gets Followers on Twitter

At times it can be weird not having a Twitter account, because it means next to nothing to me if someone gets a new follower or loses one. I do recognize that this is important to many Twitter users though, as do others, such as the researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology who performed a first-of-its-kind longitudinal study on what gets you more follows.

To perform this study the researchers examined half a million tweets over 15 months and identified 2800 positive and negative terms, in order to label whether a tweet's content is positive or negative. After crunching all of the numbers the researchers found that people do not like it when you talk about yourself and are more likely to follow you if you post information, like a news item. Tweets should also be about positive, happy things, like how to grow your social network, instead of unemployment, illness, and death. Also, as useful as hashtags can be to show your support for something, they can be a turn off when abused, causing less people to follow you.

With this research finally done, we may start to see technologists utilize it to create tools to help grow their audiences. If you are interested in following the latest news from us, you can check out the RSS Feed link at the top of the page, below the Featured Articles.